Mac is responding slowly

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

You don’t have much RAM. Are you running AE with other apps running in the background? What are your Memory and MP settings like in AE’s Prefs?

What are you actually doing that makes AE ‘seem’ slow? Is there anything specific that is more painful or is your entire experience within AE just doggone slow.

Cheers
RoRK

Intensive AE & Mocha Training in Singapore and Malaysia
Adobe ACE/ACI (version 7) & Imagineer Systems Inc Approved Mocha Trainer

[Michael Freedman]

Hey RoRK,

Memory settings are:
Installed RAM: 7gb
RAM reserved for other apps: 1.5 gb
RAM available for AE: 5.5 GB

MP settings are:
Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously – ticked
Installed CPUS: 4
CPU’s reserved for other apps: 0
Ram allocation per background CPU: 0.75 GB
Actual CPU’s that will be used : 4

It’s particularly slow when I use the camera in 3D space but over it seems quite sluggish. I always make sure that I don’t have other pro apps open, only AE and safari.

How much more RAM do I realistically need to get it moving faster? Does my graphics card have anything to do with it?

Thanks

Michael F

[Walter Soyka]

[Michael Freedman] “Memory settings are:
Installed RAM: 7gb
RAM reserved for other apps: 1.5 gb
RAM available for AE: 5.5 GB

MP settings are:
Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously – ticked
Installed CPUS: 4
CPU’s reserved for other apps: 0
Ram allocation per background CPU: 0.75 GB
Actual CPU’s that will be used : 4”

I think your memory/MP settings are way too aggressive, and that you are experiencing poor performance because you are starving the render processes of RAM.

Multiprocessing really balances CPU, RAM, and disk utilization. It’s more important to maximize render speed than it is to maximize CPU utilization, because the CPU may be bottlenecked by RAM.

In other words, you may get faster renders using only two or three CPU cores with good memory/MP settings than using all four cores with these aggressive memory/MP settings.

The Adobe recommendations for multi-processing with 8 GB of RAM installed is 2 GB for other apps and 1.5 GB minimum allocation per CPU.

[Michael Freedman] “How much more RAM do I realistically need to get it moving faster?”

I recommend a minimum 4 GB per core: some for system overhead, and 3 GB for each core for rendering. For a quad-core system, I’d be shooting for 16-24 GB of RAM. It should be pretty cheap to upgrade the RAM for 2006 Mac Pro, and it will give you a very noticeable boost in performance.

[Michael Freedman] “Does my graphics card have anything to do with it?”

Nope. There are some new GPU-related features in CS6, but none of them relate to your issue here.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Michael Freedman]

I’ve got a dual core intel xeon, so you’re suggesting 12GB RAM for better performance?

Also I’ve adjusted my memory settings in after effects to read:

Memory settings are:
Installed RAM: 7gb
RAM reserved for other apps: 2 gb
RAM available for AE: 5 GB

MP settings are:
Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously – ticked
Installed CPUS: 4
CPU’s reserved for other apps: 2
Ram allocation per background CPU: 0.75 GB
Actual CPU’s that will be used : 2

Do you reckon this is it better?
Thanks

Michael F

[Dave Simpson]

Along with the suggestions from Roland and Walter you may want try launching Activity Monitor to see what else is going on in the background. I don’t know what OS you have but I do know there is a bug with Snow Leopard where a process called Quick Look Helper sometimes steals a large bunch of your Ram. You can just use the Quit Process button if that is the case. I know When AE gets REALLY sluggish for me that’s usually the culprit.

[Michael Freedman]

Thanks, that has made a difference. Didn’t realise Spotify uses up so much RAM!

Michael F